Rats Saw God (7 page)

Lynnette Sirls:
Mistook us for the art club, but gamely stuck with GOD through the first semester despite never quite grasping the notion of dadaistic expression. We lost her to the cute shortstop of the JV baseball team, but not before Lynnette completed, at the coaxing of Doug, a papier-mâché
Rabbit in Punchbowl
which we installed in the Cabaret Voltaire display case.

Veg:
Ben Kempler (aka Veg) refused to eat meat strictly on moralistic grounds. Some said, though I never witnessed this, that he apologized to vegetables before downing them.
Before his conversion, Veg had been a chicken-fried-steak-a-day man and had the spare tire that often accompanies such a diet. By the time I met him, he could have been sharing clothes with Ghandi. Veg split his free time between GOD and the Houston chapter of Greenpeace.

Bill Whiteside:
Bill was the Renaissance man of GOD. He had disassembled his pickup's engine and put it back together, for fun. His forte was physics, but he hadn't limited his knowledge to the sciences. Bill played guitar, was an assistant editor of
Buried Treasure,
the Grace literary magazine, and had the lead in the school play.

Matt Whiteside:
As a rule, my interest in nonmain-stream sexuality runs no deeper than your standard state trooper's, but I always found it hard not to stare at Matt Whiteside, a Chippendale-without-portfolio who was quite possibly the best-looking guy in school. He wasn't, however, the Mr. Everything his brother was. He was smart, but in Doug's and my opinion, he wasted too much of his energy worrying about grades. By the end of the year Doug was calling him “Ivy,” as in “Ivy-League bound.” I think Matt liked the nickname, though I'm quite certain Doug hadn't meant it as a compliment.

Trey Collier:
Our one athlete, Mike Collier was the designated gunner on the varsity basketball team. “Trey” stemmed from his marksmanship beyond the nineteen-foot, nine-inch, three-point arc. Trey hadn't joined GOD as any form of antiestablishment protest. Au contraire, the boy dated a Buccaneer Babe, listened to Bon Jovi, and drove a Camaro. Trey was, in a sense, the only “pure” member of
GOD. He joined because he was fascinated with dadaistic art. No one needed to explain the work of Duchamp to him. Trey took art three periods a day if you include the period he was Mr. Harley's aide.

While he may have been disgruntled, Doug wasn't pouting. He put himself in charge of bureaucratic concerns—applying for a float permit, attending the drawing of parade order, picking up the list of rules, supplying the thirty-dollar registration fee. Fifty-dollar prizes would be awarded in three categories: grand champion, most spirited, and most original.

We had no doubt the float we were constructing would be the most original, but as members of GOD, we harbored little hope of winning the cash. What would the judges think of our entry? We discussed at length what direction we wanted to go with the float before critiquing the sketches offered by Dub (man-sized numerals arranged in the order of a phone number drawn at random from the Houston phone book), Samantha (a giant football player dressed in Grace's blue and gold; the hitch?—the linebacker was pushing a baby carriage), and Lynnette (the standard Grace Buccaneer broncobusting a Memorial Mustang—she was still unclear on the tenets of dadaism). We settled on Trey's sketch of a carpenter's claw hammer long enough to extend from the rear of the trailer and have its head positioned directly above the cab of the truck. The sketch evoked different reactions in all who observed it. Given its angle and red handle, I likened it to the hammer and sickle of the old Soviet Communist Party. Missy was struck by the “raw sexual energy,” Zipper the violence, and Lynnette the
notion Grace would hammer the Mustangs. Holly, with perception nearest the artist's intentions, liked the clean lines.

Bill converted the naysayers by offering to modify the concept a bit.

“You know,” he said, holding the sketch in both hands, “with a lawn mower engine and a couple bicycle gears, I could make this hammer swing up and down like it's bashing in the cab of the truck.”

As if any of us needed more reason to feel superior, the speed, efficiency, skill, artistic vision, and wit with which our float proceeded only served to cement our hubris. But our newfound loyalty to GOD didn't owe primarily to the quality of the project. I think what we experienced was one part Amish barn-raising enthusiasm and one part Chicano gang member group reliance. We went to lunch with fellow dadaists. We waved at each other in the halls. We sat next to each other in classes we shared.

As I abandoned my initial aloofness, Dub and I began an ongoing game in geometry. We took turns foretelling the futures of our classmates. These ran from standard hipster slagging, “She'll be the first woman to actually give birth to 2.2 children,” to epics nearly always ending in slapstick death. Dub killed off an especially perky front rower with invading laser-toting Neptunians who regarded hand-raising as a hostile act. Normally, the trouble with becoming acquainted through the taunting ritual is that you're forced to temper your pithiness lest you A) reveal yourself as a stone-hearted asshole or B) accidentally offend your cohort. Dub would have none of that dewy-eyed compassion shit. She went for blood.

I no longer feared Dub (okay, not as much); she was a kindred spirit. Rhonda, however, intimidated the hell out of me. She was sending out signals I was not too green to interpret: I would catch her staring at me; she would stand in my very American-sized personal space when speaking to me; she kept finding reasons to touch me, whether it was to try on one of my earrings, rub my shoulder to get my attention, or once, to pull my wallet out of my back pocket to get money for extra paint. Before I could say anything, she pulled out a five and announced that I didn't believe in safe sex.

The Wakefield
Picayune
came out today. Among other things, it said that, “York, an active member of a church group at his previous school in Texas, plans to attend a local community college. He sees a career in high school counseling in his future.”

Friday and Saturday nights were normally sacrosanct. Doug had arranged our float work schedule so as to allow social lives, or in my case, enable me to supplement my meager, by Clear Lake standards, allowance. But with a week remaining before the parade, it was obvious we needed the weekend to complete
Get Hammered
—which had become the working title of our rolling tribute to dadaism. I finagled the Saturday off.

The mechanics of the basher assembly had proven more intricate than Bill had originally envisioned, but eventually we had the chicken-wire-and-wooden-dowel hammer frame
smacking the roof of the cab every six seconds. The first of the weekend nights my comrades spent papier-mâchéing the hammer; the second night we painted. We completed the job by midnight. Seven of us were there to see the GOD float project reach fruition: the Whitesides, Dub, Missy, Rhonda, Doug, and I. The rest we lost to fatigue, weekend jobs, dates, and, in Holly's case, the following morning's administration of the SATs. The Dub Club came prepared for the grand finale. As Bill brushed the final layer of silver paint across the hammer's claw, Missy pulled three bottles of champagne out of Dub's black hole of a backpack. Dub dug further into the sack and emerged with plastic champagne glasses—the kind in which the stem snaps into the bowl.

“El Presidénte”—Dub curtsied and handed the bottle to Doug—“would you do the honors?”

“Ah, but yes, fair maiden,” said Doug as he relieved Dub of the bubbly, purloined earlier from Missy's parental liquor cabinet. Doug's cavalier demeanor was quickly replaced by that of a sea dog. When the cork, once shucked of its foil and wire binding, didn't give way to nimble tugs, our leader stuffed the bottle top in his mouth, growled, and pulled the offending cork out with his teeth.

“How boorish,” Missy observed.

“Très gauche,”
added Dub.

Our glasses wouldn't give us the onomatopoeic satisfaction of a
clink,
but toasts abounded nonetheless. We christened
Get Hammered
in the name of Marcel Duchamp, Stanley Hardware, Inc., and GOD almighty. We all sat on the float and began to get hammered ourselves. After downing
the first bottle, Missy, who was sitting next to me, suggested we play a drinking game called “I Never” she had learned at a Rice party.

“It's easy,” she said. “Whoever's turn it is makes a statement that begins with the words ‘I Never.' If you've never done whatever that person says, you don't have to drink. But if you have done it, you drink.”

“Give an example,” Matt said.

Missy sat back on her heels, happy to be in charge. “Okay. Let's say it's my turn. I could say, ‘I never made out with Johnny Ludden behind the junior high gym.' Now everyone who can honestly say they've never made out with Johnny behind the junior high gym can refrain from drinking. Rhonda, on the other hand, better make like a fish.”

Rhonda turned red and buried her face in her hands, and for a moment I was sure she had quit breathing. Dub laughed so hard champagne spewed out her nose and down her E
XPOSE
Y
OURSELF TO
A
RT
T-shirt.

“I always thought Johnny was lying when he told us about all the chicks he nailed back there,” Doug said, torturing poor Rhonda further.

Over the next hour I learned much about my allies. It turns out Doug and Missy had kissed in elementary school. Dub had caught her parents getting stoned on a camping trip. Matt was the only one among us who had had sex with the editor of a high school newspaper. (The rest of us were forced to admit we were still lousy with virginity. Missy
had
contemplated groupiehood in Material Issue's Econo Lodge room, but the bass player in question passed out before any deflowering
had taken place.) I was surprised to learn Doug had tried out for, and been cut from, his junior high football team.

Dub upped the ante a bit with her next probe.

“I've never masturbated,” she said, arching her eyebrows at her male comrades.

None of the girls drank; they just stared wide-eyed, lips pursed in tight little prunes of giddy anticipation. They broke into hysterics when Doug slugged down his André with gusto. Bill and I followed a bit more reluctantly. Noticing his little brother wasn't drinking, Bill levied his wrath against his sibling.

“Boy, I know how long you spend in the bathroom. You best start drinking.” He said this in a tone I thought reserved for the chastising of black children by their parents on television sitcoms.

Matt bashfully raised his plastic chalice, and in a flash of bravado, said “Cheers” before sipping.

He was rewarded with polite, if sarcastic, golf tournament applause from the women. Doug's turn was next, and I thought surely he would settle the score with the girls. Instead, he blindsided me.

“I've never not kissed someone of the opposite sex in my life,” he said.

“What kind of ass-backwards English is that?” I said. “Does that mean you have kissed every girl you've chanced upon during the past sixteen years?”

“I think what he means is that he
has
kissed a girl at least once in his life,” Rhonda said, picking perhaps the most inopportune time to find her voice.

“Bingo,” said Doug proudly.

No one was drinking. This was embarrassing. I turned to look out the barn door and tried to sneak a shot, but it was hopeless. I was snagged.

“Just as I suspected!” Doug bellowed. “My boy! From this day forward, your Indian warrior name is No Lips.”

I wanted to explain that I had had opportunities to kiss girls. In eighth grade, Charlene “the Holstein” Sanders towed me into a closet during my first boy/girl party, hoisted her arms over my shoulders, and tried to initiate me; but in the dark, my dodge-and-parry skills overwhelmed her power-smooch strategy. In California, a youngish receptionist at my mom's office kissed me at a staff party, but it was in front of a knot of smirking real estate agents. Besides, it was one of those “Isn't he cute? Won't he be handsome when he's a man?” sort of kisses… though it was on the mouth.